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Swiss Government Backs Privacy Oriented ISP
judgecorp writes "The Swiss government owned telco Swisscom is pitching a "Swiss Cloud" operator which promises to keep customers' credentials private in the wake of the NSA spying scandal. Switzerland has strict privacy laws, with which the Swisscom cloud complies, and the operator now wants to offer that more widely."
As a swiss guy (born and living here): you have some good point, unfortunately and sadly they are wrong.
* Guns: Adult males (which are required to do military service) have a gun, but no ammo at home. No self-defence for us.
* Energy: we produce some energy and sell it during the day to other countries. During night, we buy it back at a far lower price to fill up the dams. There is give and take, and economic mostly us as winners.
* Crapload of money: yes there are some, like banks/etc. The common rabble doesn't. Life is very expensive here in Switzerland, except the iPhones.
* Finger to the NSA: I'd wish, but but our ministers do *always* what the USA is asking, often in advance.
So: no. We are USAs bitch like many, many others.
(unfortunately I forgot my password, therefore: anonymous swiss coward)
This. I am a dual citizen, USA and Switzerland, I live in the US. I had a bank account in Switzerland with less than $2k in it. Last year the Swiss bank closed out my account and sent me the funds. The Swiss government caved in to pressure from the US and changed it's banking laws. They will do the same thing with internet privacy.
That's a pretty hard sell. They're white...
The US has fought repeatedly against nations populated primarily by white people when there was cause. That includes Britain (1776, 1812), Germany (1917, 1941), Italy (1941), Spain (1898), France (1798), and the whites and white government of the Confederate States of America (1861). The US was ready to go to war for 50 years (1947-1991) against the largely white Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania) in Eastern Europe, and intervened in the Russian civil war (1918). There appears to be a problem with your race based theory. Too many people here have "brown on the brain." (We'll pass in silence over the wars in Asia.) The issue is the behavior of the nation in question, not the color of its population.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Buy ammunition, get arrested, go to jail.
Many people don't know that beyond the weird NRA-based claims of "armed nation", swiss men have assault rifles at home disassembled and with no ammunition. Assembling the rifle and taking it out of your home without special permission is a crime. Having ammunition for it without special permission is also a crime. They brought down their mainly assault rifle based gun crime down hard with that policy.
That said, their army has excellent plans on how to distribute ammo in event of threat of war.
Strict bank secrecy laws were not amended: to do that the government would actually need to change the constitution, since that's where this protection is defined. Every change to the constitution needs to be approved by popular vote, so even if the government caves in to the US requests, it has to actually convince the majority of Swiss voters to approve the amendments in the mandatory vote. What actually happened is that many Swiss banks got threatened with lawsuits in the US and decided that US customers were more hassle than they were worth it.
As far as I remember they had similar pattern of domestic violence that Kosovo has. I.e. instead of knives, or small arms most wounds were high energy ballistic (caused by high power assault rifles), which are far more serious in nature.
It's not that they had a lot of it. It's that the pattern of this particular form of crime, which usually takes form of "most accessible weapon" was significantly more fatal than that in neighboring countries. By removing easy access to ammo, domestic violence cases went to more traditional "knives, flying pans and small arms" that gives victims a much higher chance of survival.